Christos Jonathan Seth Hayward was born in 1975 in
Riverside, California and had a childhood filled with curiosity and
exploration. In eighth grade, he ranked 7th in the U.S. in the 1989 MathCounts
competition, programmed a four dimensional maze, and
did an independent study of calculus. This mathematical fascination prepared
the way, over time, to ongoing explorations in other areas. These other
explorations would feed into his work as an author on the web.

Hayward entered high school in 1989 at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy. There
he continued in mathematics while pursuing a breadth of other interests. These
interests laid broad and deep foundations for his later multidisciplinary
endeavors on the web. In 1990-92, he administered a student-use social network
that effectively provided web 2.0 functionality before the web became widely
known. He also participated in, and wrote for, discussions on the social network,
continued in French, and pursued more whimsical endeavors such as programming a
video game on his calculator. He graduated in absentia in 1992, away
in Washington, D.C. for a math contest.

He went on to study at Wheaton as a
National Merit Scholar majoring in math in 1992, before transferring in 1994 to
Calvin. Outside of class time at these two
schools, he continued with interests that would come to have surprising
connections and bear fruit in his later writing. He read the Bible at length,
began working on the web, and started to write works that would be published on
his main site. During his studies at Calvin, he earned an advanced
certificate from the Sorbonne in 1995
before graduating from Calvin in 1996.

He began his post-graduate education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in
1996. He earned his M.S. in applied math in 1998 with a computational science
and engineering option and being the first person to graduate with the new
master's thesis option. During that time, he began to explore other languages
besides French and English. He passed a proficiency test to opt out of a year's
German coursework within two weeks of self-study. (He would go on to study well
over a dozen dialects and languages: ancient, medieval, modern, "conlang,"
computer...) By the time Hayward had finished his first master's, he had
already begun his literature site...